


Making Friends

by ChronicBookworm



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, NCIS
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Crossover Pairings, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, F/M, Kidnapping, Pre-Relationship, Snark
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-02
Updated: 2017-01-02
Packaged: 2018-09-14 06:03:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,316
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9165331
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChronicBookworm/pseuds/ChronicBookworm
Summary: Dawn and Tim are both kidnapped, possibly for ritual sacrifice purposes.





	

There was a girl in the cell with him, knocked out. Well, hardly a girl, really, more a woman. Tim would hazard a guess and say she was in her mid-twenties, a few years younger than him. They were chained up side by side, almost touching, but not quite. She’d been there when he came to, and he sat for maybe five minutes before she started stirring. She didn’t open her eyes, but he could tell when she awoke from the tensing of her shoulders and the very subtle movement as she tested her bonds.

“Hey,” he said, and her eyes flew open and she jerked.

“Whoa, you scared me! I did _not_ expect to find someone else in here,” she said.

“Yeah, sorry about that. I’m Tim,” he introduced himself. “Any idea where ‘here’ is?”

“Dawn, and no, not a clue. You?”

“None.”

“Fabulous,” she muttered. “And it’s not even Tuesday.”

“Tuesday?”

“I have a bad history with Tuesdays. But today is Thursday, unless I’ve been out longer than I thought, and I am not ready to be kidnapped _on a Thursday_.”

People would latch on to the weirdest things to keep themselves under control in a stressful situation, Tim knew. Days of the week was a new one, but to each their own. At least she wasn’t panicking. She was in fact taking it surprisingly well for a civilian. He was impressed, and what’s more, he thought Gibbs would be impressed, too.

“Don’t worry, I’m confident my people will find us and come get us,” he said, mainly to reassure her, but partly because he needed the reminder himself.

“Your people, huh?” she asked with a sideways glance at him, clearly not believing him.

“Yeah, I’m a federal agent. We don’t leave our people behind. They’ll come for me,” Tim said with certainty. He’d been on the other side of these searches several times, and the one thing he knew was that Gibbs always pulled through.

“Okay,” she shrugged. “Let’s make a bet.”

“A bet?”

“I bet my people will find us before yours do.”

“Your people? You’re a federal agent, too?”

“More like… international.”

Huh. That surprised him. She looked very young.

“What agency?”

“The ISWC,” she said easily.

Tim narrowed his eyes.

“I’ve never heard of it.”

“We’re a pretty small organization, and the stuff we deal in is pretty… specialized. Usually we pronounce it ‘iswick’. My friend Xander thinks it would be cool if we were known as the ‘Wickies’, like the FBI are the Feebs, but that’s a terrible name, right?”

“Specialized how?” he asked, ignoring her unsubtle attempt to derail him.

“Do you have any idea who took us?” she asked instead of answering his question. Well, he’d met with more than a few international agencies that would hide behind classified and need to know – it was par for the course. Of course, not even being able to say what jurisdiction they had was a little extreme. Still, he went with it. No use alienating his one ally here.

“No, I didn’t see anything. I don’t even know how they knocked me out. I was out for a morning jog, and the next thing I knew, I woke up chained to a wall in this cellar.”

“I was getting coffee on my way to work,” she said. “OK, so both taken probably this morning, no idea where, no idea who, any idea why? Off the top of my head, I can think of ransom, blackmail, ritual sacrifice –”

“Ritual sacrifice?” he asked. He’d seen some stuff in his time at NCIS, but he was surprised that her mind would go there as number three, before kidnapping them for information, slavery, or forcing them to commit a crime (he didn’t know what exactly her skills are, but he could easily imagine someone making him hack in somewhere for them).

She shrugged.

“It’s been known to happen.”

“To you personally?”

She shrugged again, but didn’t answer.

“Okay, well, we’re both agents of some sort – maybe it’s got something to do with that,” he suggested.

“Maybe,” she said, sounding doubtful. “Hey, you never said what agency you’re from.”

“NCIS.”

“NCI-what?”

He blinked – it wasn’t unusual to meet people in the public who’d never heard of NCIS, but within the other agencies? That _was_ unusual.

“It stands for Naval Criminal Investigative Services,” he explained. “We investigate crimes related to the US Navy or Marines.”

“Navy and Marines, huh,” she said. “Have you ever heard of a project called the Initiative? It was a secret Army project from the late 90s. Or the names Riley Finn, Graham Miller, or Maggie Walsh? There was also a Colonel Mac-something-or-other, and a General Havisham? No wait, that’s the old lady from Great Expectations. Huh, that’s a fun mental image, I’ll have to pass it along to Willow when we get out. Anyway, I think it was Haverman, Haviland, something like that?”

He shook his head.

“None of that sounds familiar. There’s a lot of Colonels Mac-something-or-other, though.”

She made a face.

“Yeah, I know. I was a teenager at the time, so I wasn’t exactly with it when it all went down, all I know is stuff I picked up from listening at doors and stuff I’ve been told later.”

“You were listening at doors about the details of classified Army projects as a teenager? Who were you listening to?”

“My sister and her friends, they got involved on the outskirts of the project – the participants were undercover as grad students when they were at college. They weren’t discussing _secrets_ secrets. Just, you know, ‘what are these people up to and why are they trying to kill us’, that sort of thing.”

“Okay,” he said doubtfully. It still seemed very hinky to him. Especially the ‘trying to kill us’ part of it.

“Seriously.” She nodded solemnly. “But I can’t tell you anything about the project if you don’t know about it. Or, I _could_ , but I really shouldn’t. Secrets, you know.”

“Yeah, I know secrets,” he said. “Navy investigator, remember?”

She smiled widely at him, then her smile faded.

“So, no idea who, what, where or why,” she said. “No way that I can see to break out of these chains. Might as well settle in and get comfortable.”

*

“What kind of secret agenting do you do?”

“I’m a member of the Major Crimes Response Team, which is kind of self-explanatory, and not secret at all. Most of what I do involves looking into people’s backgrounds or financials. Sometimes their computers.”

“So you’re like a hacker?”

“Umm… sometimes.”

“That’s cool. I mostly read old books.”

“Really? What kind of old books?”

“Oh, all sorts, really. Mostly myths from all over the world, old legends, prophecies, that kind of thing.”

“Seems like an odd thing for an international agency to specialize in,” he commented.

“Well, when I said agency, I didn’t really mean _agency_ as such. We’re a non-profit historic society that sometimes gets called in to help the authorities with crimes that tie into the occult.”

 “So you see a lot of weird cases, then?”

“You have _no_ idea.”

*

“And then we lived in Rome for a year – Buffy loved it. _So_ many shoes… So. Many. _Shoes_. Her boyfriend sucked, though. Her third totally sucky boyfriend.” She smiled to herself at some private joke. “I swear she’s cursed or something. And the ones that didn’t suck were total wusses. Or asses, some of them were asses. And don’t forget the absolute wankers.”

“Wankers?”

“I lived in Scotland for a few years, some things stuck.”

*

“The weirdest case we had… okay… I’ve got to say the koala on the submarine…”

“The what on the what?”

“Yeah, that was my reaction too. We chased it around for about two days before we finally caught it, and then the damn thing peed all over me.”

*

“… only to realize about five seconds after the auction closed that they were left-handed golf clubs, and Ducky’s right-handed!”

“Twelve hundred dollars and they were totally useless?”

“Totally useless. You should have seen his face!”

*

“It’s kind of like a puzzle. A lot of the time you’ll have the vague outline of the translation, you can recognize enough words to have a rough understanding of what it says, and then you use your knowledge of historical linguistics and the customs of the time to fill in the rest bit by bit. It’s really, really satisfying when you have a complete translation in front of you, that you’re almost certain is correct.” She paused for effect. “And then one of your colleagues comes along and you get into a huge argument about pronoun structure and did they actually mean this word, because a lot of old languages don’t have a reliable script, so what we’ve got are reconstructions, and sometimes words get transliterated wrong, and it’s all a mess and you’re never done.”

“And you do it for fun?”

“Fun and profit,” she grinned. “Trust me, it really is fun.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

*

“I’d have to say Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmer. She was pretty awesome.”

“Good choice. I’d pick Cleopatra. I mean, she basically brought the Roman Empire to its knees, how badass is that?”

*

 “I’ve written a series of crime novels called ‘Deep Six’. They actually made the New York Times bestseller list.”

“You’re Thom E. Gemcity? No way! I totally love your books. I adore L.J. Tibbs. Wait, is he your Gibbs?”

*

“My arms are asleep.”

“Mine too. They could at least have padded the cuffs.”

“I’m going to complain to the manager. Lodgings were extremely uncomfortable, with only a hard floor to sit on and unpadded cuffs. The food would have been better if it actually arrived. Zero out of ten: would not recommend.”

“Oh, god, why did you mention food? I’m _so hungry_.”

*

“I’ve kind of always dreamt of having kids, a white picket fence, the whole shebang, but it’s actually really difficult with the hours I work at NCIS. The deepest relationships I have are with my co-workers, but don’t tell that to Tony. I don’t know of any NCIS agent with a functioning relationship. I mean, Gibbs has three ex-wives, and who knows how many ex-girlfriends. I don’t want to be Gibbs.”

*

“Anchovies on pizza are the best ever, and I won’t listen to any more of your slander!”

“No way. Fish on pizza? That’s just _wrong_.”

“Why are we talking about food again?”

*

“Between us, we had about three functioning parents. Oz had a healthy relationship with both his parents, but he was the only one. Mom was amazing. Dad basically walked out on us when I was ten. Willow’s parents were at best neglectful, Tara’s mom was dead and her dad and brother were at least emotionally abusive, maybe they slapped her around a bit, I don’t know, she hardly mentioned them, we only met them the once when they tried to convince her she was a demon and we scared them out of town – good times – Faith’s mom was an alcoholic and probably a druggie too, and Xander’s dad used him as a punching bag while his mom was busy searching for the answers to life the universe and everything at the bottom of a bottle. So Giles kind of adopted us. He’s totally the best. I mean, he didn’t sign up for a handful of dysfunctional and traumatized teens, and I’m sure he felt totally out of his depth more often than not, but he stuck with us. He was there for us.”

“Ziva’s dad left her to die in a Somali terrorist camp.”

“Okay, that definitely goes at the top of the ‘horrible parenting’ list.”

*

They had moved onto embarrassing teenage crushes when Tim heard a sound in the corridor. Dawn must have heard it as well, because she stopped in the middle of a sentence.

The… people (for a lack of a better word) who came to get them were white. There was Tim’s own personal brand of ‘turn-crimson-rather-than-tan-so-may-as-well-not-bother-going-outside’ kind of white. There was albino white. These “people” were _white_. ‘Complete absence of color’ kind of white. And it wasn’t just their skin; that was the truly creepy part. _Everything_ was white. Their hair, their scalp, their hands, their lips, their eyes: pupils, iris and sclera, even the insides of their nostrils were white.

“What the hell are you?” Tim demanded. “What do you want with us?” He tried to make himself look bigger, channeling Gibbs from every pore. If he could have stepped in front of Dawn, he would have, but the chains around his wrists made that impossible. The white people didn’t speak, just drew long swords before unlocking their chains. There were six of them, and they formed a semi-circle around Dawn and Tim. As soon as his arms were free, Tim stood up and reached out a hand to help Dawn up. She took it gratefully and shook herself out as he surreptitiously placed himself between Dawn and the white people. Judging by her wry smile, he hadn’t been surreptitious enough.

“Seriously, what the hell are these people?” he asked, this time to her.

“Not human,” she replied.

“Yeah, I can see that. But what?”

“My best guess – demons.”

“Demons? Really, demons? Like supernatural demons or what?”

“Yuh-huh. That’s what ISWC deals with, demons, ghosts, vampires, witches and all kinds of supernatural goodness. These people look pretty demony to me. Don’t know what kind though. Help a girl out?” she asked the white person-demon in front of her, smiling disarmingly.

Instead of answering her, the demon handed them each a white bundle that when opened turned out to be a robe of some kind. Dawn sighed.

“Ritual sacrifice it is. _And_ they’re traditionalists. I hate traditionalists. Like, who cares if I’m in a sacrificial robe made with wool gathered by Tibetan monks chanting a ceremonial chant under the waxing moon or just in jeans and a t-shirt? It doesn’t make any difference to the ritual, and I’ll still be just as sacrificed.”

They started putting the robe on over their clothes, but were stopped by a snarl from the lead demon. He made some sounds accompanied by some fairly crude gestures, and Dawn sighed again.

“So apparently we’re supposed to take of our clothes before we don this stylish sacrificial robe. _All_ our clothes.”

“You speak demon?” Tim asked.

“Actually, ‘demon’ is not a language,” Dawn said testily. “There are thousands of demon languages, dead and living. I speak Aratuscan, and the language they speak is close enough that I can understand more or less what they’re saying. Think of it as someone speaking Italian when you speak Spanish, only not really, because Aratuscan’s a dead language, so more like Italian and Latin.”

The head demon snarled again and waved his sword at them. Tim tried to turn away to allow Dawn privacy to change, even though the demons were probably not allowing her any such courtesy, given how hard they stared at him as he quickly stripped and pulled the robe over his body and tied it closed. It was a plain, white robe, with no ornaments except the white band used to tie it closed. The sleeves were long and wide, and the hem of the robe just brushed the floor when he stood up. Dawn was in exactly the same kind of robe that he was, and it bunched up against the floor.

Once they were dressed, their hands were bound tightly in front of them. A thick, weird-smelling lotion was smeared in patterns over their faces.

“Yay, anointment time,” Dawn said flatly.

The demons waved their swords at them and ushered them out of the door. Dawn had to lift her robe up as she walked in order not to trip on it, which was hard to do with her bound hands. Tim wished he could help, but he wasn’t much better off himself. There were six demons, with very sharp, very pointy swords, against him and Dawn, bound and unarmed. There was no point in resistance. He’d play the part of the obedient prisoner until there was an opportunity for escape.

Unfortunately, it seemed they knew what they were doing when it came to taking prisoners. Both he and Dawn had the tip of a sword pressed against their backs, and the other four walked beside and in front of them, cutting off any direction they could have gone, had they not been in a small, narrow corridor. They were led up a flight of stairs into a larger room that held six more demons, surrounding a pentagram made out of a script that Tim couldn’t identify. The room was lit by a skylight, showing the pink tint of the setting sun. So, still daytime then, just about.

Dawn took one look at the setup before snorting.

“Oh, yay. The only thing I hate worse than traditionalists – _incompetent_ traditionalists. They got the Aratuscan wrong. So, good news – the world’s not gonna end. Bad news – we’ll still be dead.”

Which was… not really reassuring, and he told he so.

“Wasn’t meant to be,” she said glibly. “But it’s still good news. I happen to like the world.”

The demon snarled something at her.

“What? It’s not my fault you’re doing it wrong.”

There were two hooks hanging from the ceiling in the middle of the pentagram, and Tim’s fears were realized when he and Dawn were suspended from them – he could stand on the floor if he stretched, but she could only stand on her tiptoes. Tim was really hoping for a rescue, because their chances of making it out alive on their own were frankly not looking too good.

The demons started chanting, low and slow, as the sky outside the skylight turned from pink to red and then darkened to a dark gray. Every now and again, their chants would be punctuated by Dawn snorting or muttering something unflattering under her breath. He was impressed by how well she was holding it together – he was starting to feel a tiny bit more panic creep in the longer Gibbs took to show up. This may well be how he died – as a sacrifice in a botched ritual to end the world, which was not really how he’d expected it to happen.

Eventually the head demon raised his sword to strike at Dawn’s neck –

Only to fall forward with an arrow protruding from the back of his skull.

Tim looked up at the skylight and saw a blonde woman holding a crossbow launch herself through it and land nimbly on her feet. He hadn’t even noticed the skylight opening, and the angle of the skylight and the demon made it an extremely difficult shot, especially in the dim twilight. Tim doubted he could have made it with a gun, much less an unwieldy crossbow. _Maybe_ Gibbs or Ziva could have (although he didn’t know how they were on crossbows – but knowing Gibbs and Ziva, he could easily believe that they were experts), but regular mortals like him or Tony, no way.

“Wow, you guys are really practicing the art of the last minute rescue, aren’t you,” Dawn called to her. The woman flashed her a quick grin.

“You’re welcome,” she said, before launching herself at the closest demon, slashing it in two with a sword.

Another woman dropped through the skylight, this one Hispanic, as two people came thundering up the stairs behind him and Dawn.

Their rescuers, four of them against what was now ten demons, and rapidly becoming fewer, danced and weaved through the demons, slashing and stabbing as they went. Three of them had swords, the fourth, a lithe red-head, was hurling fireballs at them. Tim almost felt sorry for their captors, who were hopelessly outmatched.

“You OK, Dawnie?” the blonde woman asked as she cut them down.

“Never been better,” she snarked. “I just love spending ten hours chained to a wall in a small damp room before almost being cut open in a botched ritual sacrifice.”

“Botched?”

Dawn indicated a section of the pentagram that to Tim looked pretty much like any other section. The red-headed witch snorted as she took it in.

“And for those of us who like to play hack-and-slash rather than what’s-that-symbol?” the blonde asked.

“It says that they want to sacrifice the Gods for the glory of their captives.”

“And that, children, is why you should pay attention in school. Syntax matters.”

“So, Dawnie, introduce me to your friend,” the blonde woman said eyeing Tim.

“This is Tim, my co-sacrifice. He’s an NCIS agent.”

“NCI-what?”

“NCIS,” Dawn said as if explaining to a child, as though she hadn’t asked exactly the same thing just a few hours ago. “Navy cops. Tim, my sister Buffy, and our friends Willow, Caridad and Rona. My people, which means I totally win and you owe me coffee.”

“Dawn likes her coffee with syrup and sugar and whipped cream and cocoa powder and fairy glitter and sparkles,” Caridad teased, parrying a blow from one of the few remaining demons. “It’ll probably cost you a monthly salary to take her out.”

“They make those kinds of coffee?” Tim asked in amazement.

“She’s messing with you,” Dawn said. “We don’t actually use fairy glitter in coffee. Potions, on the other hand…”

“You’ll have to forgive me, I’m new to this whole supernatural business.”

“I’ve got to say, you’re taking it really well. Unnaturally, possibly pathologically, well. Where’s the freak-out?” Buffy asked.

“I’m pretending this is a new video game and I’m still learning about the world-building. Don’t worry, I’ll have a proper freak-out at home when it hits that this is actually real and it actually happened.”

Dawn nodded.

“I should call my boss and let him know I’m okay,” Tim said.

“Good luck with that – there is no reception here,” Rona snorted.

“In that case, I really need to get somewhere with cell reception ASAP, so I can call my boss.”

The women gave him and Dawn a once-over.

“I’ll take Rona and Willow and see if we can find your things,” Buffy said. “Caridad’s our field medic, she’ll see if you need any patching up, and then we can be off.”

The three women headed down the stairs. It didn’t take long for Caridad to declare them none the worse for wear and handing them each an energy bar.

“You should eat something more substantial in a bit, but this’ll tide you over. You’ve only missed two or three meals, one day of fasting doesn’t really hurt, but you should still make sure you eat something.”

They heard a crash from downstairs and then several voices shouting in tandem:

“NCIS! Freeze! Federal agents! Drop your weapons!”

There was a clang as a sword hit the ground, but then Buffy’s voice:

“Why don’t you drop yours first?”

“Drop the sword,” Gibbs repeated. “Where’s McGee?”

Tim, Caridad and Dawn looked at each other in alarm, and then they all rushed towards the stairs. Tim was halfway down when Buffy burst out:

“ _Willow_!”

“What? You know I don’t like guns,” Willow said defensively. When Tim came down to the main level, he saw Tony and Ziva standing on either side of Gibbs, their sidearms drawn. Gibbs was in the middle, and his position was practically identical to Tony and Ziva’s with his arms outstretched, but instead of his Sig-Sauer P228, he was holding a tiny, black, meowing kitten. He hadn’t moved, and was staring at the animal in shock. Tony and Ziva’s mouths were hanging open. He had the feeling none of them quite knew what was going on or how to react.

“You turned his _gun_ into a _kitten_?!” Dawn asked Willow accusingly, and Tim turned to stare at her. Of all the things he’d seen today, this was probably the hardest to swallow. The other stuff was – weird, sure, but this broke fundamental laws of nature.

“I panicked, okay?” Willow said, throwing he hands up. The movement made Tony and Ziva both turn to her with their guns.

“Whoa, easy there,” Buffy said, stepping in front of Willow. “Point those things somewhere else, if you please.”

The situation was rapidly getting out of hand, and Tim knew he had to step in somehow. Having just seen Dawn’s people in action, he really wasn’t sure who would win if it came down to a fight. Sure, his people had more advanced weaponry, but they were almost in melee range, and Dawn’s people had vastly superior speed and reflexes (probably supernaturally superior reflexes, but Tim was determinedly Not Going There– not until he could have the aforementioned freak-out).

“It’s okay, Boss, they’re good guys,” he said. All three of his teammates’ attention immediately went to him, but they kept their weapons trained on the women in front of them.

“McGee, you okay?”

“Yeah, Boss, I’m fine. Bit tired, arms ache, haven’t had anything proper to eat all day, but apart from that I’m all good, thanks to Buffy and her people.”

“Good to hear.” The MCRT holstered their weapons, except Gibbs, who was still staring at the kitten in consternation. Dawn decided to solve his problem by taking it off him and cradling it in her arms.

“Any chance you can turn little Siggy back?” she asked Willow.

“Dawn! He’s a living thing, that would kill him!”

“Yeah, but he’s also a gun.”

“Not anymore.”

“Question: who gets custody? Technically, Siggy is Gibbs’ gun,” Caridad asked.

Dawn cradled the kitten closer.

“I suppose,” she said, her face, posture and tone all screaming reluctance. “Do you want him? Her?”

“I want to know what the hell is going on!” Gibbs demanded.

“Yeah, that might take a while. Short version: Tim and I got kidnapped, separately, spent a day chained to a wall, almost got sacrificed, and then my people burst in with their last-minute ways and hacked and slashed and rescued us.”

“Oh, I’m gonna need the long version,” Gibbs said attempting to stare her down. She appeared entirely unaffected.

“In that case, I suggest we don’t do it here in the entrance hall,” Buffy said. “Tim and Dawn are going to find their clothes, because sacrificial robes are so not her style, and I doubt very much they’re Tim’s style either, and then I suggest we find someplace to sit. Sound good?”

Gibbs just glared at her, but she evidently took that as assent, because she chirped:

“Great, it’s a plan!”

Rona bent to pick up her sword.

They quickly gathered their clothes and belongings, and Tim and Dawn changed back into their own – slightly worn and dirty – clothes, which at least were better than the robes. There were no chairs in the house, but Willow made a few comfy armchairs appear out of thin air. Tim sat down in one, gingerly, and his team followed suit. Dawn, Willow and Buffy had immediately thrown themselves in the chairs and were sprawled all over them. Rona and Caridad stayed outside to guard, and to clean up the corpses of the white demons.

“So, as you’ve no doubt figured out,” Dawn began, “magic is real. So are demons, vampires, werewolves, ghosts, and most other supernatural creatures you’ve heard of.”

“Except leprechauns,” Buffy interjected. “Those are a myth.”

Dawn rolled her eyes.

“Except leprechauns,” she agreed. “So, the world is full of bad things that want to bring on hell on Earth. Why is there currently not hell on Earth? That’s where we come in: the International Slayers and Watchers Council, or ISWC to those not in the know. We study the supernatural and take out creatures that become a threat to humans or the world. The demons that grabbed me and Tim were ludicrously incompetent, and really unlucky, in that they grabbed me out of all the people they could have. I think it was a random grab – unfortunately, Slayers can be a bit slash-happy, so there’s none of them left alive to question. Anyway, best we can gather, they were performing a ritual to end the world, which is nowhere near as unusual as it ought to be. I’m thinking they were lone nutters, because they made a lot of amateur mistakes, and didn’t seem to be that well organized. Anyway, through the power of magic, the ISWC managed to locate me, and rescued us about _five seconds_ before my head had to say goodbye to my throat.”

“I think the key word of that sentence is ‘before’, and you’re welcome,” Buffy said brightly.

“The knife was _three inches_ from my throat!” Dawn exclaimed. “Forgive me if I panicked a little bit!”

“Well, if we’d left it to Charlie’s Angels here, you would be an ex-Dawn, so a little gratitude wouldn’t go amiss,” Buffy said.

“True,” Dawn conceded, then turned to Tim. “That coffee you owe me had better be a large,” she grouched.

“I’ll get you the biggest coffee with all the syrups they’ve got and a mountain of whipped cream,” he promised her. “I’ll even add some fairy wings and powdered unicorn horn if I can get my hands on them.”

“My kind of man,” Dawn grinned.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Tony groaned, but the effect was marred by the wide grin splitting his features. “Probie gets kidnapped and ends up with a date? I have taught you well, my young padawan; finally, the student has surpassed the teacher.”

Gibbs slapped the back of his head.

“I want to know what you did to my gun,” he demanded of the group. They looked at each other. Dawn was still cradling the kitten that had been Gibbs’ gun.

“Willow… has a bad history with guns,” Dawn said, as though she was choosing her words carefully. “She doesn’t like them, hates them in fact, and well…”

“You can say it, Dawn,” Willow interjected. “I panicked at the sight of a gun and my magic got away from me. We’re lucky I’ve been working with the coven on how to channel my unintentional magic into something positive – it could have been way worse.”

They all grimaced at that.

“Well, this has been – fun,” Dawn said brightly, “but I am starved! Who’s up for pizza?”

She opened the door to Rona and Caridad.

“You up for ordering pizza and mocking the weirdoes on America’s Got Talent?”

“Sure,” they both agreed.

“Oh, god, yes,” Buffy agreed. She stood up and leaned faux-casually on her sword, looking straight at Tim.

“Just so we understand each other,” she said, “that’s my baby sister you’re dating. She’d better not ever cry over you.”

Tim swallowed.

“Got it.”

“And to think, Buffy’s the nice and cuddly one,” Rona said. “Willow’s the scary one.”

Given that he’d seen her turn a gun into a cat on pure instinct when she was frightened and not thinking straight, Tim could well believe it.

“Guys,” Dawn complained. “It’s just a coffee.”

“Well, just a coffee turns into dinner, which turns into a movie, which turns into late night demon research, which turns into holding a sword hoping to God and all that’s holy that the portal won’t actually open because if it does there’s you and about fifteen teenaged girls standing between the world and its doom. He’s got to be able to take the heat.”

Willow shrugged.

“Well, he took the whole apocalypse demon sacrifice thing really well. Perhaps there’s hope for him yet.”

Tony patted him on the back.

“There’s hope for you yet, Russell.”

Tim rolled his eyes. He didn’t even know where it was from, but he knew that was a reference of some sort. Dawn grinned at him.

“So, inter-agency pizza? It’s on the ISWC.”

She looked to the NCIS agents. Gibbs tilted his head to one side in a half-nod.

“Ladies,” Tony proclaimed, “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

**Author's Note:**

> "There’s hope for you yet, Russell" is a quote from the 2000 comedy Almost Famous.


End file.
